Managing Music Players with Clementine

I’m still having fun with my new music player. I have to say that it piques my interest in portable music players in general, but it would take a while for me to get another, though 😆.

Choosing what music to put in it is not an easy task. I have a lot of music and only 8 GB of storage. But Clementine makes it a little easier to manage my music. Here’s how.

If this is the first time you use Clementine, add your music folder from Tools>Preferences>Music Library, and rescan your music library from Tools>Do a full library rescan.

Plug your music player in, and it’ll appear on the Devices menu on the left sidebar.

Just for the record, Clementine doesn’t always recognize the name of your music player right away; mine appeared as a generic USB device until I renamed it and changed its icon. You can do so by right-clicking and choosing Device Properties. On the same window you can also see the used/free space, see some information about your player, and make Clementine convert all the files you copied to another file format.

You can see, play, copy to library, and delete the music available on your player. Unfortunately, Clementine only shows music as Artist>Album>Songs, which is not very convenient.

To copy music to your player, right-click and choose ‘Copy to Device’. You can do it both from the left pane and the playlist pane.

If you prefer to browse music on your player by folder, you should pay attention to the next dialog. To organize your music, Clementine can automatically rename files and put them in folders based on their tags (artist, album, genres, etc.), but maybe the default naming option won’t suit you. You can customize it, though.

[Default naming.]

[Custom naming.]

Conclusion

I think Clementine is a pretty nice app for adding music to my PMP, but it’s not a convenient app for deleting them. I found it helpful that Clementine could automatically convert and rename files I copied – it saved lots of time instead of, let’s say, manually renaming files with Puddletag. However, I don’t like that I can’t change how it shows the available music in my PMP. If I want to remove all rock songs/oldest-added songs from my PMP, I can’t do it easily with Clementine.

I don’t like Rhythmbox or Amarok as a music player, but I’m going to try them as a manager for my music player.